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DEBATE. In recent weeks, a study showing that certain shellfish have as great a climate impact as beef has had a huge impact on the Swedish media, or as the headlines of Expressen and DN say: “Shrimp is meat. beef in worse climate than red meat “,” Shrimp is great climate beef like steak. “
The idea of a “worst” culprit is, of course, welcome because it brings comfort to all weather-eager meat eaters when the focus for a moment shifts elsewhere. And the study results, presented by the Swedish Research Institute (RISE), are important for understanding the climate footprint of our food choices, but morally motivated food choices become less than serious when not placed in a broader ethical context.
Is chicken really better?
The RISE study uses the measurement of the climate footprint per kilo of meat to calculate the climate impact. It is a practical measure of climate impact, but it loses important values. To produce a kilo of meat, very different numbers of individual animals are required depending on the species we are talking about, something that is absolutely crucial when it comes to animal welfare.
Replacing beef and pork with a herbal diet is the best option for the climate and the animals. But such a change in behavior takes time, and it is likely that carnivores, which is still the dominant norm in all institutions today, as a first step towards a more environmentally friendly diet, will switch to poultry.
It reveals both the food industry’s shortcomings in ethical standards and our moral choice in terms of what we choose to eat.
Each individual herd can produce around 200 kg of meat, while only 2 kg can be extracted from each individual chicken. To produce the equivalent of what a cow gives, one must raise and slaughter about 100 chickens, and if humans replaced the consumption of beef and pork with chicken, the number of chickens raised would increase exponentially, to much more than the already a staggering 24 billion. global level.
Large volumes
This, of course, is morally problematic. When animal welfare is raised to a higher ethical scale, the weights change. It can be said that the suffering of an individual cow raised for an economically optimized slaughter, given its higher welfare potential, is greater than the suffering of an individual chicken. But if you take into account the suffering we inflict on these billions of free-range chickens that live with metabolic problems and painful bone lesions for most of their lives, the quantities, the volumes, become relevant to moral calculation.
When it comes to seafood, the number is even higher, while it is difficult to say that a shrimp is a moral issue in the same sense as a cow or a pig. Here, instead, the morally relevant weights shift to the consequences of production for the climate, which is why the conclusions of the RISE report appear as open doors: 333 shrimp are needed for one kilo and thus about 70,000 shrimp for the equivalent of a cow, and that should come as no surprise. that the production of the first wears out as much the climate as the second.
Moral cherrypicking
The calibration of the number of dead individuals, the nutritional value gained, the degree to which different species may experience suffering / well-being and the different production processes of the climatic footprints of the food industry are today some of the morally relevant parameters with which they work. philosophers. It is an ethical framework work that often reveals both the food industry’s deficiencies in ethical standards and our moral choice in terms of what we choose to eat.
Most people in wealthy regions of the world decide three times a day what to eat and even if it is difficult to optimize on all fronts, there is room for improvement by seeing what should be prioritized and when. It is impossible to make ethically perfect decisions, but improving the relationship between thought and practice is not only possible but also necessary.
By Julia Mosquera
Archive. Dr. in Philosophy at the Institute for Future Studies and Researchers in the project “Climate Ethics and Future Generations”
READ MORE: Let’s not force our elders to eat vegetarian
